In Dual-Faith Families Children Sturggle For a Spiritual Home

By ARI L. GOLDMAN

Published: August 18, 1988

MICHAEL LERNER'S father was Jewish and his mother was Episcopal. In the home of his youth, both faiths were practiced at various times, he says, and there was little conflict over religion. But as an adult, he found the two faiths at odds. Rather than embrace either, he turned to the spiritual tradition of yoga, studying with the Hindu teacher Swami Satchidananda.

''The struggle for me was that if I pursued my spiritual life as a Christian, I would be unfaithful to my Jewish background, and if I pursued my spiritual life as a Jew, I would be unfaithful to my Christian background,'' said Mr. Lerner, a health researcher who lives in Bolinas, Calif., just north of San Francisco in Marin County.

So every morning Mr. Lerner meditates before an altar with likenesses of the Buddha and of Jesus as well as a Star of David. He lights a candle to symbolize, he said, ''the light of truth in all spiritual traditions.''

There are now 375,000 Jewish-Christian couples in this country, more than half of whom married in the last 20 years. The numbers are growing: in 1950, 6 percent of Jews who married chose Christian spouses; today, 40 percent do. Children of those marriages number at least 750,000. While Mr. Lerner is a particularly dramatic example, virtually all have had to struggle with a dual religious background.

The prevalence of dual-religion families has given rise to a spate of books in recent years. The authors, who among them have interviewed more than a hundred children of these unions, generally agree that with roots in two worlds, the children of interfaith marriages still feel tension and still face the difficult choices described by Mr. Lerner.

Some have a sense of loss. Some take pleasure in the diversity of their parents' religious heritage.

The children of Gov. Michael S. Dukakis and his wife, Kitty, are perhaps the most visible examples of grown children who have had to come to terms with a dual-faith family.

Mr. Dukakis, the Democratic nominee for President, is Greek Orthodox and his wife is Jewish. They have three children.

''They consider themselves half Jewish and half Greek,'' Mrs. Dukakis said last month in an interview with The Atlanta Jewish Times. ''My husband is Greek Orthodox and the children have shared in the richness of both of our heritages.''

The Dukakis campaign headquarters in Boston declined to arrange an interview with the couple's two daughters, Andrea, who is 22, and Kara, who is 19, on the subject of religion. A family friend said the Dukakises felt it was a personal matter irrelevant to the campaign. The Governor's stepson, John Dukakis, 30, is the child of Mrs. Dukakis's first marriage to a Jewish businessman.

Egon Mayer, a professor at Brooklyn College who has studied the issue for the American Jewish Committee, said the Dukakises are fairly typical of American interfaith couples today.

''Like two-thirds of the couples, they did not convert to each other's religion and did not impose any religion on their children,'' he said.

Nearly half of the dozen adult children of Jewish-Christian marriages interviewed for this article refused to allow the use of their names. ''This is an intensely personal subject,'' one of them said.

Among the children of the intermarried, there are all sorts of variations. Many profess no faith at all.

Some are Jewish, others are Christian and still others live in a world that straddles both religions. Some, like Mr. Lerner, have found new forms of religious expression. Mr. Lerner, the son of the journalist Max Lerner, is the president of Commonweal, an environmental health center. He is 44 years old and has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a five-year cash stipend awarded to exceptionally gifted people.

Mr. Lerner's yoga is a spiritual discipline used in Hinduism to achieve liberation of the self and union with ''the universal soul.'' Mr. Lerner said: ''Yoga is a practice that is fundamentally ecumenical in that it does not involve any rejection of one's spiritual traditions. I can comfortably say I am both Jew and Christian.''

Mr. Lerner said he did not want to make his decision sound easy. There was a ''terrific feeling of loss,'' he said, in ''not being part of the unbroken linkages of familial religious traditions. I feel that loss very acutely. But the deep connection with the spirit of Christ and the spirit of Judaism is not lost.'' Another child of intermarriage, Bill, a 42-year-old lawyer in Washington, has become an atheist. His mother, a Christian, converted to Judaism to satisfy his father's Orthodox Jewish family. But ''she doesn't think of herself as Jewish,'' Bill said.

''I went through early adulthood as an agnostic and then woke up as an atheist,'' he said. Yet, he said, ''Emotionally I am very Jewish.''

He added: ''I feel like a constant outsider. In a synagogue I feel like an outsider, and in the Christian world I feel like a Jew. I feel that I am always perceived as 'the other,' and in fact I perceive myself that way. I wish I had been given a more complete Jewish identity or a more accepting dual identity.''

Other children of interfaith marriage rejoice in the religious diversity they inherited. ''I have the best of both worlds,'' said Davis Guggenheim, 24, who works for a Hollywood film production company. ''I can go to a coming-out party at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington and hold my own in Cantor's Deli on Fairfax Avenue in L.A.''

Ultimately, Mr. Guggenheim said, he may have to choose between Judaism and Christianity. ''But as of now I'm in the 'undecided' column,'' he said. ''I'm still 24 and I don't need God yet. When I'm 35 and trying to find meaning in my life outside work, then I'll struggle.''

Harriet Edwards, 38, an associate professor of mathematics at California State University at Fullerton, said she still feels no need to choose between the Judaism of her father and the Protestantism of her mother.

''It's enriching to have both,'' she said. ''It makes it harder to get seriously self-righteous.''

Among the most recent publications on this subject are ''Mixed Blessings'' by Paul Cowan, with Rachel Cowan (Doubleday, 1987, $18.95), Lee F. Gruzen's ''Raising Your Jewish/Christian Child'' (Weber/ Dodd, Mead, 1987, $16.95) and Egon Mayer's ''Love and Tradition: Marriage Between Jews and Christians'' (Schocken, 1987, $8.95, paper). The authors offer sometimes conflicting advice on raising children of mixed marriages, but all seem to find that the children share certain characteristics. As Mr. Cowan describes them, they are ''bridges between two cultures'' and tend to be ''very effective negotiators.''

They also seem to offer creative solutions to problems. Two of them, Leslie Goodman-Malamuth and Robin E. Margolis, founded Pareveh, an organization for the children of Jewish-Christian marriages. Pareveh is taken from the Yiddish word describing foods that are neither milk nor meat. The name whimsically reflects the ambivalence many children of intermarriage say they feel.

Ms. Goodman-Malamuth is the child of a Jewish father and a Christian mother. After years of searching, she said, she decided to convert to Judaism, although she said she did not turn her back on her Christian heritage. ''I live as a Jew,'' she said. ''I am raising my son'' - Gabriel Nelson, 1 - ''as a Jew, but I'm always going to have the two halves.''

Even for those brought up in one faith, the lure of the other may remain strong. Annie, the daughter of a Protestant mother and a Jewish father, was brought up Jewish, sent to Hebrew school and celebrated her bat mitzvah with relatives of both religions. But at college she began to explore her Christian roots. No minister or missionary influenced her, she said, only books like C. S. Lewis's ''Mere Christianity,'' and long, emotional discussions with friends. Today, at 22, Annie calls herself a Hebrew Christian and has explored Messianic Judaism, which follows Jewish traditions but maintains that Christ was the Messiah. ''Christianity began as a Jewish movement,'' she said. ''There is a real relationship between them. A Hebrew Christian is a beautiful blend.''

Jan, 35, had conversion experiences of a different kind. The mother of three young children in a suburb of Washington, she was brought up a Protestant by her Christian mother and Jewish father. ''By nature I was religious,'' she said, ''I was searching for the right label.'' In college she converted to Roman Catholicism and soon afterward married a Jewish man. Both she and her husband decided to maintain their individual faiths while raising Jewish children. After more than a decade of marriage, Jan converted to Judaism.

''I feel good about the decision,'' she said. ''But I know that so far as my own identity is concerned, it is going to be a lifelong process to figure it out. I'll never feel that I belong 100 percent in either place.''